A Question Of Love Poem by Delores Gauntlett
A Question Of Love
Back when I used to play doctor: I am
passing the house with its blinds fully pulled;
the boarded up window facing the road
nails out the past from what they say love did
to the girl at a city school. Three years
she’s been in that room with her diary of hurt.
What stalks her mind robs her of speech.
Like a slate wiped clean, she returns to the bed
that is her fort against the overhang
of whatever fills her mind with its long night.
To hush the shame, no one’s invited there.
That house: above eye level from the road,
with whitewashed stones up to the verandah steps
forming two lines from the gate. A hard wind flaps
a nearby breadfruit tree as I pass,
marvelling at what the adults deem
might be fruit for a juicy conversation,
blind to the secret in the children’s game
of 'Thread yuh needle, thread, oh, long, long thread, '
while she, stuck in a world she cannot
leave behind her, lurks in a room
whose curtain never moves in the wind.
Very enigmatic...a mark of good art. The title, A Question of Love, seems to stand in contrast to the hurt expressed in the poem below. This ambiguity gives it a haunting effect. Overall, the poem - for me - thematically (not as incest but as forbidden sexuality, which is all sexuality since the garden) recalls Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury'. So does the use of colloquialism in its closing lines. Are you from the south? I gave this poem an eight...but it could easily be made into a ten. There is a bit of excess verbiage that can be cut, as well as one glaring obversity: how can we know that the 'blinds are fully pulled' if the window is 'boarded shut'? (but i could be missing something here.) In sum, you have taken pain, and transformed it into a work of art (see my poem 'Boys Dream') . A very beautiful thing indeed! Re-write it a few times an ye'll have a '10'er' lassie.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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4/19/2024 7:35:56 AM # 1.0.0.1119
Thanks for taking the time Todd Garland. I've only just now seen your comment. The blinds are pulled on all other windows to the house, but one bedroom window is boarded